Elections supervisor taking no chances with security

Sunday

With additional federal money flowing through the state, the St. Johns County Supervisor of Elections says she still has time to layer in additional security ahead of the August 28 primaries.

Vicky Oakes told The Record on Thursday she didn’t want to share a lot of specifics about what she is doing with her portion of the money, but said her office is going to “increase some layers of security in addition to what we have already done.”

The money, about $120,000, is St. Johns County’s slice of more than $19 million that state officials announced earlier this month they would be accessing from the federal government as concerns swirled that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election.

“The monies can be used for cybersecurity,” Secretary of State Ken Detzner, Florida’s top election official said not long after the Legislative Budget Commission formally accepted the money.

It will go toward “preventing any access, breach, hack or however you want to define it, of our election system,” he added.

The July 19 announcement came a week after a federal indictment charged that several Florida county election sites were targeted by Russian hackers during the 2016 campaign. The indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign included allegations that an email account sent more than 100 “spearphishing” emails with malware to infect host computers in several unnamed Florida counties. Detzner has declined to say which counties were targeted.

But he did tell lawmakers that his office was notified last September by federal officials about the attempted breach, and said Florida’s online elections databases and voting systems remained secure.

Earlier this year he told county elections supervisors that Florida would not access the federal money for the upcoming campaign season, but he was later overruled by Gov. Rick Scott. The governor also ordered the hiring of five cybersecurity specialists as consultants, after the Legislature failed to approve the addition.

Detzner downplayed criticism by some county elections officials that the money is coming too late to make a difference in this year’s elections. But he acknowledged that concerns about hacking are now a constant concern for elections officials.

Oakes said she had asked for more — a total of $189,000 — but could only secure immediate approval for needed items that could be put in place quickly. The difference, she said, hasn’t been lost and she may be able to circle back to make additional requests at a later time.

She said her office is expecting approval today for the $120,000 and will be able to implement the additional security that the money purchases quickly. And although she was tight-lipped about what exactly that will be, Oakes did say her office has already upgraded hardware, software and firewalls as well a layer of “two-factor authentication” and an “Albert server” which monitors all traffic in and out of the office’s network.

Oakes expressed confidence in the county’s voting security and pointed out that the tabulation computers are not ever connected to the Internet, though other office computers are.

Further, she said, because of the use of paper ballots, which leave a paper trail that can be checked against any computer generated figure, the system is really “the safest there is.”

Nevertheless, Oakes said, there have been significant changes to the office’s other information infrastructure since 2016 and what they are doing now is “just more of it.”

She said she is grateful for the upgrades and, when asked, didn’t seem to care to get into any argument as to whether the extra money is coming too late to make a difference.

“I am just happy to have the funding available,” she said.

This story contains reporting from John Kennedy with GateHouse Florida.

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